Bank customer sent £64,000,000,000,000 instead of £200 in ‘fat finger’ mistake

One of the US’s biggest banks accidentally transferred more than $80 trillion (£64 trillion) to a customer’s account in a ‘fat finger’ mistake.

The employee at Citigroup had meant to credit the account with $280 (£220).

Two co-workers even approved the astronomical sum – more than 20 times the UK’s GDP – before it was sent to the client’s account the following morning.

It was only flagged when a third spotted problems with the Wall Street giant’s overall balances and managed to reverse the payment.

No funds left Citi, which disclosed the ‘near miss’ to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Financial Times reports.

A Citi spokesman said: ‘Our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts, and we reversed the entry.

‘Our preventative controls would have also stopped any funds leaving the bank.’

The bank’s spokesman added that ‘a payment of this size could not actually have been executed’.

There were 10 near misses of $1 billion or more at Citi last year, down from 13 the year before, according to an internal report seen by the FT.

Citi declined to comment on this report.

Last month, Citi CFO Mark Mason said the bank is investing more to address its compliance issues, referring to regulatory penalties for risk management and data governance.

‘We saw the need to invest more in the transformation on data, on technology, on improving the quality of the information coming out of our regulatory reporting,’ Mason said.

Last July, Citi was fined $136 million for insufficient progress in tackling those issues.

In 2020, it was fined $400 million for some risk and data failures.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.